Day to day plans – Having a dynamic To-Do list

I’ve come to regard myself as being like Winnie-the-Pooh “a bear of little brain”. I like to give myself a task, settle down to it and get on with it without distractions. Sometimes the task itself can be quite complicated though.

In recent posts I’ve shared a view of “Strategic” and “Tactical” plans with you. I know you haven’t seen what is inside them but I find having them enormously useful. That brings me to the next level down: the day to day, dynamic To-Do list.

Having a dynamic list of the tasks I have to do is enormously useful. If I’m managing other people doing things, then I need to know what they are doing too. This is what the classic project plan is all about. Even a small team needs a shared plan. I used to create them using spreadsheets but now I use a special purpose tool.

The picture above shows screenshots from today’s dashboard. The tool I use is PBWorks Project Hub (http://www.pbworks.com/). I use the “Freemium” version, and I find it adequate for my needs. It does most of the things I would have been doing with a spreadsheet and it does some other things too.

It is very good at doing the boring Project Office things like bugging people (including me) when they are due to be doing something today. It is also good for collecting reports of progress made or problems encountered. All that has to happen is that people have to get into the habit of making one-line notes on the task they are working on each day.

I have a geographically dispersed team. The two of us exchange notes and have the occasional phone call, but the project dashboard gives us something that we can go back to for status information without a lot of cumbersome bureaucracy (which would usually devolve to me!). The only downside of this approach is that we are using a cloud service which requires internet connectivity and could be vulnerable. That means that I take what I think are appropriate steps to have the critical information stored in some other form elsewhere.